Far From The Madding Crowd

The first sound was not the wind here.

It was the heater in the wall — the kind that ticked as it warmed, hissed as it cooled — but at night, when the Fenland fog pressed against the windows and the silence swelled, the heater’s breathing would drop away. And then he’d hear it.

The hum.

It came through the floor this time, not the girders. Lower, wetter. Like something living beneath the hospital was holding a single note in its throat, waiting for him to notice.

Daniel lay on the narrow bed, staring at the uneven plaster above. The ceiling bulged in one corner, as though a bubble of the past was trapped inside the building and might burst if he looked at it too long.

Across the room, on the chair by the door, Nurse Fiona sat knitting with the steadiness of someone who could keep a whole ward from coming apart just by existing. Sixty four, face mapped with small, precise lines, hair the color of dry wheat. She had been on the night rota for the last three months. Never hurried. Never asked about that flat, or the door, or the key. But she’d seen him wake with his hands clamped over his ears.

“You’re hearing it again, aren’t you?” she said, without looking up from the needles.

He didn’t answer. You didn’t answer questions like that here.

Somewhere below, in the half-used east wing, something scraped — slow, dragging. And then a voice, low and waterlogged:

“Lad?”

The peat man.

Daniel closed his eyes. The peat man’s voice always sounded close, no matter how many floors were between them. Half-man, half-mire, the old nurses said. Dug up from the bog when they widened the drainage ditches in ’63, but still alive, because something had kept him.

Nurse Fiona set the knitting in her lap. “Don’t start with him. You know what happens when you start.”

Daniel opened his eyes, fixed them on the bulge in the ceiling. The hum was stronger now.

The hum pressed harder in the floorboards, and under it — faint, but there — came the same knock pattern he had been repeating when he was eleven. The one from the door.

Three short.

One long.

Pause.

Two short.

He sat up.

“Daniel.” Nurse Fiona voice was even, but it had that thick undertow she used when she knew he wasn’t listening. “Stay in the room.”

The floor was cold against his bare feet. The key — still hidden, years later — might as well have been burning in his palm. Only he didn’t have it anymore. Hadn’t seen it in years. But some part of him felt it, the way phantom limbs feel for amputees.

He crossed the threshold before she could get up. The corridor smelled of boiled vegetables and rain. The light buzzed, not quite in rhythm with the hum.

The east wing was sealed after sundown, at least on paper. No one wanted to work it. Too damp. Too much rot in the floorboards. And the peat man.

He’d never seen the man fully. Only glimpses: the curve of a shoulder that was too dark and too smooth, a hand that left wet prints on the tiles.

Now, at the end of the corridor, where the linoleum turned to warped boards, the air shifted. Not warmer, not colder — just heavier, like someone had pushed water into the space and forgotten to drain it.

“Lad,” the voice came again, closer now.

From the gloom, a shape emerged. Not hunched, not stumbling — standing. His upper body was wiry, human, dressed in what might once have been hospital whites from the 1950s. Below the waist, the fabric darkened, clung, and then gave way entirely to peat — fibrous, black-brown, as though his legs had grown roots in the bog and simply brought the soil with them.

His eyes were the wrong kind of still.

“I was a nurse,” the peat man said. “Same as her.” He jerked his chin toward Fiona, who had followed but stopped just short of the east wing. “But I saw things in this place, back then. Something they made us keep. Can’t let it go.”

Daniel didn’t move. The hum was under his skin now.

The peat man leaned closer. The smell of wet earth and something metallic filled the space between them.

“They’ll be coming for you again. The ones from the other side of the door. You’ll hear them here, too.”

Behind Daniel, Fiona’s voice was a taut wire: “Fiona. Back. Now.”

But he couldn’t tell if she was warning him about the peat man… or protecting him from what came next.

The tumblers inside shifted with a sound far too deep for a lock — like a massive gear turning underwater.

The hum left the key and moved into the floor.

Daniel lunged for him, but the peat man’s arm shot out, holding her back with the effortless weight of the bog. She hissed something under her breath — not words, not in any language Daniel knew — and the air went sharp, metallic.

The bolts on the door yawned outward. One by one.

The seam down the centre split.

A thread of air bled through — warm, familiar, smelling of wax and dust and the faint iron tang of the Arsenal flat.

Daniel’s chest tightened.

Then the gap widened enough for light to spill through, not candlelight but that strange evening light from the high panes, dusty and slow-moving, like it had somewhere else to be.

A hand came through. Small. Pale. A boy’s hand.

Daniel didn’t step back.

The fingers curled into his wrist with impossible strength, pulling him forward — not yanking, but drawing him the way tide draws kelp, inevitable, constant.

Fiona shouted his name.

The peat man let her go, but she was too late. The hum swelled until it was all there was, pressing out thought, pressing out time.

Daniel stepped across.

The door shut behind him without a sound.

The first sound was the wind.

Not outside exactly — more like the echo of it, scraped into the bones of the building.

Daniel’s feet sank slightly into the wooden boards. They were warm. Familiar. The grooves where he used to trip over the loose plank near the velvet chair were still there.

The light through the high panes was perfect — that amber wash that made the air thick, slow. Dust moved in tall columns.

“Daniel.”

The voice came from the kitchen. He turned.

Two boys stood there.

Identical.

One leaned in the doorway, watching him. The other crouched by the old birdcage, empty as ever.

“You’re late,” the doorway one said.

Daniel blinked. “Late for what?”

The crouching one didn’t look up. “We’ve been counting the knocks for years. Thought you’d never answer.”

He swallowed, the familiarity and wrongness colliding in his chest. “Where’s my mother?”

The doorway boy smiled, not unkindly. “She’s where she’s always been.”

The air in the flat felt heavier now. The hum wasn’t gone — it was here, threaded into the walls. And somewhere beyond the kitchen, a door he didn’t remember having in the flat was quietly closing.

Daniel stepped toward the kitchen. His boots made the same muted scuff they always had on the boards, but the sound didn’t seem to travel. It just stopped, as if the air was swallowing it whole.

The crouching boy finally looked up from the birdcage. His eyes were wrong. Not in shape or colour, but in depth — like they had too much distance in them, layers stacked back into some place Daniel couldn’t see.

“You brought the key,” he said.

Daniel’s hand twitched. The key was gone, but his palm still remembered the weight.

From the far side of the flat came a low thud. Then another. Not knocks this time — something dragging.

“Who else is here?” Daniel asked.

The boy in the doorway tilted his head. “You know.”

Simon opened his mouth, closed it. The hum in the walls was slow, patient, as if it could wait forever.

The kitchen light flickered — but not electric. It was as though something had passed in front of the high panes outside.

He stepped past them, into the wide open space where the paths of books and crates coiled through the flat.

At the far end, in the place where the bolted fire door had never been, there now stood a narrow figure. Tall. Still.

For a moment, Daniel thought it was his mother.

Then the figure turned its head, and the skin of its face pulled wrong — not flesh, but something painted over, like an old wall.

The two “boys” padded up behind him, one on each side.

“They move backwards,” the crouching one whispered. “But you already knew that.”

Daniel’s stomach lurched. He remembered his mother’s story — the family behind the fire door, living in reverse, a mirror of them.

The figure stepped closer, and as it did, its face began to unpaint, layer by layer, revealing something much older beneath.

The figure stopped just shy of the nearest column of light.

Its head tilted, and when it spoke, the voice was exactly his own.

“You left the door open.”

Daniel’s pulse jumped. “Who are you?”

The two “boys” breathed in at the same time, a sharp, careful inhale, as if tasting the air.

The figure stepped forward into the dusty beam. The paint-layer skin peeled more, flaking at the jawline, revealing a younger face beneath — but not a child’s. His own, maybe five years ago, eyes rimmed red from nights he couldn’t remember.

“You think you came here,” the voice said, “but you’ve only gone further in.”

The hum in the walls deepened, pressing on Simon’s ears until it was almost painful. The floor felt warmer now, pulsing faintly, as if something beneath it was breathing in time with the walls.

The crouching boy reached out and touched Daniel’s sleeve. “Don’t answer. Not yet.”

“Answer what?” Daniel’s voice came out thin.

The figure smiled — a perfect mirror of the way he’d smiled at strangers when he didn’t trust them. “You’ll know when you’ve already done it.”

Behind him, somewhere deeper in the flat, another door — one Daniel had never seen before — creaked open.

The sound of the creaking door was too slow — not the quick, splintering swing of a hinge, but a stretched version, like hearing something in reverse.

Daniel turned toward it.

At first, it looked like the old laundry alcove — the one his mother had filled with crates of geological samples. But the crates weren’t there. Instead, he saw a narrow corridor lined with wallpaper he didn’t recognise.

He stepped forward. The “boys” followed, padding silently, one on each side like escorts.

The corridor’s floorboards flexed underfoot — not because they were weak, but because they were breathing. Each step pressed into them and came back slower, like pushing against a tide.

Halfway down, the air changed. The dust didn’t float upward in the light — it fell. A glass on a side table slid toward the wall instead of away from it.

The boy on his right said, “We’re nearly home.”

The other corrected him: “We’re nearly gone.”

At the end of the corridor was a second door, slightly ajar. Through the gap, Daniel saw the Arsenal flat again — but wrong.

Candles burned taller, as though unmelting. Shadows ran up the walls instead of down. In the far corner, a kettle poured steaming water back into itself.

And by the window, with her back to him, stood his mother.

He opened his mouth.

The “boys” pressed their fingers to his lips in unison.

“She hasn’t said it yet,” one whispered.

The other finished: “And when she does, you’ll have to follow her out.”

Daniel froze in the doorway.

The “boys” dropped their hands but stayed close, their shoulders brushing his.

His mother stood perfectly still, her head tilted just enough to catch the last of the dying light.

Only — the light wasn’t dying. It was rewinding.

The sun was climbing up the panes, pulling shadows back into the corners.

She lifted her hand slowly, almost lazily, and set a teacup down on the table beside her. But instead of the sharp porcelain click, there was a soft, sucking sound — the way a seashell fits back into sand.

Without turning, she said, “I told you not to knock.”

Daniel’s chest tightened.

The voice was the same, but it was missing something — or maybe it had gained something. An echo.

The “boys” stepped away from him at the same time, moving toward her. Each footfall landed without sound, and as they walked, their outlines began to blur, as if each of them was walking into another version of himself.

His mother finally turned.

Her eyes caught the light, but not the way they used to. They reflected it back — not gold, not brown, but a pale, mirrored shimmer, like water at night.

“You came through,” she said. “That means you’ll have to go further.”

She stepped toward him, and with each step, the flat behind her pulled away — not fading, but receding, like she was bringing the rest of the world with her.

Her steps slowed until she stood directly in front of him.

Up close, her face looked almost ordinary — the fine lines at the corners of her mouth, the faint freckle under her left eye — but there was no warmth in the skin. It was the stillness that frightened him most, the way her chest did not rise or fall.

Behind her, the receding flat had shrunk into a long, narrow hallway, with the furniture and shadows pulling backward like film spooling onto a reel.

She held out her hand.

“Once you step,” she said, “you’ll walk in every direction at once. There’s no keeping only the part you like.”

The hum in the walls grew sharper, the air vibrating against his jaw.

Somewhere behind him, the original Arsenal flat — the one he knew — was gone. Only the breathing corridor remained, its floorboards swelling under some unseen tide.

The two “boys” stood on either side of her now. But they weren’t boys anymore.

Their limbs were long, faces older, and their eyes were the same pale mirrored shimmer as hers.

“Time to choose,” one said.

The other added, “Or be chosen.”

Her hand stayed in the air between them, steady.

Daniel’s own hand twitched — forward, then back. The pressure in his skull built until it was almost a scream.

And then the lights — if they were lights — blew out.

Not dark, not light, just blank.

The first sound was water.

Not running — seeping. Somewhere in the walls, under the floor, in the quiet sponge of the building itself.

Daniel opened his eyes to the dim ceiling of the ward.

A fan turned slowly above him, each rotation lagging slightly, as if it were thinking about the movement before committing.

He knew where he was — the hospital in the Fens — though “hospital” didn’t feel right. The place had more of the weight of a ruin than a refuge. Corridors that bent without reason. Windows that looked out onto blank fog no matter the weather.

He sat up slowly. The mattress gave a damp sigh beneath him.

Across the room, Nurse Fiona sat in her chair, the pale blue of her uniform washed out in the half-light. She was reading, or pretending to, her eyes tracking nothing on the page. Sixty four, maybe older. Hands rough from decades of soap. Her hair was pinned in the same tight coil every day, like she didn’t want anyone to know its true length.

“You’re awake early,” she said, without looking up.

Daniel ran a hand over his face. His skin felt raw, as if he’d been out in the wind all night. “Couldn’t sleep.”

“Bad dreams again?”

He almost said not dreams, but stopped. The backward family wasn’t something you handed to someone over morning tea.

Instead he said, “Something like that.”

Fiona set the book down and finally looked at him. Her eyes were sharp, but not unkind. “They don’t like the nights here, either. The walls.”

Daniel stared at her. “The walls?”

She gave the smallest shrug. “You’ll hear it. If you haven’t already.”

From somewhere down the corridor, faint and slow, came the sound of wet footsteps.

The wet footsteps drew closer, slow and deliberate.

Nurse Fiona didn’t turn toward the sound — she just kept her eyes on Simon, as if gauging how he’d take what was about to appear.

From around the corner came a man.

Or almost a man.

His clothes were the ghost of an old nurse’s uniform — the starch gone, fabric dulled to the colour of bog water. The hem was tattered and frayed, clinging wetly to his calves. His skin, where it showed through, was dark and fibrous, like turf cut straight from the marsh. Small glints of mica winked in the ridges along his forearms.

His face was mostly human, though the jawline looked softened, eroded, the way peat eats what it keeps. His eyes were sunken but bright, with that raw, startled light of someone who has seen too much and never looked away.

He stopped just inside the room. Water pooled around his shoes, though Simon hadn’t seen it drip from him.

“You’re the new one,” the man said.

His voice was hoarse, but there was a strange depth to it, as if it came from somewhere beneath the floor.

Daniel swallowed. “Who—”

The man stepped forward, the smell of wet earth and rusted metal thickening the air. “Doesn’t matter who I was. What matters is what stayed here. What I saw.”

Daniel shifted in her chair, not interrupting, but her knuckles tightened on the armrest.

Daniel’s pulse quickened. “And what did you see?”

The man’s eyes flicked toward the wall behind Daniel, as though expecting it to move. “Them. Before they went under.”

The man’s gaze stayed fixed on the wall, like it was a window he could still see through.

“When the water came,” he said, “they didn’t drown like the others. They sank upward.”

Daniel frowned. “That’s not—”

“They didn’t breathe air anymore. Didn’t need to. Just… reversed themselves. Breath went in the wrong way. Eyes stopped taking light, started giving it back.”

Fiona’s chair creaked. “That’s enough for now,” she said quietly.

But the man didn’t stop. “I was a nurse then. This building wasnt new, even then, the water was higher. We kept the fevers on the top floor, where the wind could reach them. Thought the air would dry them out. But one night, the river got in.”

Daniel leaned forward. “Into the ward?”

“Into them,” the man said, his voice a rasp. “It filled them like lungs. But they didn’t die. They turned. And the ones who turned started walking backwards through the doors, through the walls. I saw one go clean through a fire door that was bolted shut. She looked at me like she knew me from before I was born.”

His eyes finally moved from the wall to Daniel. “Some of them stayed under. Some still are. You can hear them in the walls, shifting. Sometimes they send a part of themselves forward, looking for someone to take back.”

Daniel’s mouth had gone dry. “And you think—”

The man smiled, and it was the smile of someone remembering pain. “I know you’ve been near them.”

Daniel’s hands went cold.

He’d never told anyone about the backward family. Not Fiona. Not any of the doctors. He hadn’t even said the words aloud since the night the lights went blank in the Arsenal flat.

But the man’s voice — the slow, deliberate rhythm, the way he described them stepping backward through doors, through walls — it landed with the precision of memory.

“You’ve seen them,” Daniel said.

The man tilted his head, that soft, eroded jawline catching the light. “Not just seen. Heard. Smelled. Felt the way the air changes when they stand near you. How your skin knows before your mind does.”

“That’s—” Daniel stopped. His chest tightened. He saw again the pale shimmer of their eyes, the way the corridor had breathed under his feet.

He tried to keep his voice steady. “When you saw them… were there children?”

The man’s expression flickered. “Not children. Not anymore. You can’t hold that shape once you’ve gone under. You can wear it for a while, if it helps you get close. But sooner or later—” He made a motion with his hand, like peeling something away. “—the real face comes through.”

Fiona stood abruptly. “That’s enough.”

The man didn’t look at her. His peat-dark gaze stayed locked on Daniel. “You know their touch. You still carry it.”

Daniel’s mouth opened, but no words came. Because suddenly, horribly, he knew the man was right.